Comments by qroqqa

New name for element 118, with symbol Og, formerly temporarily known as ununoctium. It is named for the pioneering physicist Yuri Oganessian. Note that it ends in -on, not -ium, to match the elements above it such as neon.

New name for element 117, with symbol Ts, formerly temporarily known as ununseptium. It is named for Tennessee, the state where the Oak Ridge laboratory, part of the grouping that discovered it, is located. Note that it ends in -ine, not -ium, to match the elements above it such as fluorine.Announced by the IUPAC on 8 June 2016 and confirmed on 28 November.

Meg seeks cwm becks. 'Cwm' is possibly the only English word made solely of prime-numbered letters (bcegkmqsw) that doesn't contain an E. Seriously, does no-one have a list of prime-lettered words . . . or a word for them? (Primogram?)

In Norwegian maritime folklore, a sea captain who behaved so lewdly with his men that they mutinied and threw him overboard, was believed to lurk deep underwater, and return once in a hundred years in the form of the Klitter, a vast, multi-tentacled disrespecter of persons, refining his technique as he slumbers.

Tennyson knew all about him, of course:

There hath he lain for ages and will lie

Battening upon huge sea-worms in his sleep,

Until the latter fire shall heat the deep;

Then once by man and angels to be seen,

In roaring he shall rise and on the surface die.

Naturally nudists are terrified of his rising and of his noodly appendages.

The IUPAC has finally (finally!) agreed that ununtrium, ununpentium, ununseptium, and ununoctium have been discovered, and have invited the discovery teams to submit names, so we can hope that Ghiorsi gets his glory. However, the naming rules for the last two columns have recently been changed, so that ununseptium will get a name ending in -ine like astatine above it, and ununoctium will (I hope) become ghiorson, like radon above it.

The same article by Ourobengr also explains 'best worst case failover time', and mentions the start(failure)/stop(failure)/fatal-gunshot-wound-to-the-head cycle, which is now my favourite kind of cycle.

An action taken by a standby node (server) that was been unexpectedly promoted to primary node in a failover, because the heartbeat between them has gone wrong. As it is unknown when or if the original primary node will recover and start behaving as a primary node, it may be necessary to stop it doing so: Shoot The Other Node In The Head (STONITH). Gee I love that kind of talk.

In the case of the lower spectrum of the high redshift quasar, a 'forest' of absorption features is seen at wavelengths blueward of the Lyα emission feature. This absorption is due to clouds of neutral hydrogen gas between us and the quasar.

The sense of monitored information has spread from intelligence to astronomy: in this phys.org article 'Milky Way's back hole shows signs of increased chatter', the chatter is X-ray flares becoming more frequent as the object G2 moves close to the galactic black hole Sgr A*.

Different products. It's traditionally an overly-sweet drink for children, but recently an alcoholic ginger-flavoured beer was brought out by Crabbie's. It's very good, not too sweet, and it's not mild either, it's a respectable strength. It's not the first beer with ginger flavouring: Badger's Blandford Flyer is also very good, but somehow I wouldn't call that <i>ginger beer</i>.

There's no problem with calling Pluto a planet. The problem is with the pedants who insist that there are nine planets, for no good reason except that this was what was true when they were growing up. No doubt many people who grew up between 1846 and 1930 felt the same about the absurd claim that there was a ninth planet: that titchy thing? Give me a break.

Let Pluto be a planet. You're then committed (both linguistically and scientifically) to saying Quaoar, Sedna, Orcus, Eris, Varuna, Haumea, and Makemake are planets, to name just the more prominent named ones. When I was growing up there were 103 elements and I learnt them all. I have resisted the urge to tell scientists they're not allowed to discover any more.

If they're not allowed to demote anything because pedants don't like it, then they weren't allowed to demote the planet Ceres, or the planets such as Juno and Vesta discovered in quick succession after it.

Mr Ralph Strauch appears to be a Feldenkrais practitioner, whatever that may be, and lives in Pacific Palisades in California, which sounds as if it has a good view of the sea, so he's probably the guy you'd go to for the low-down on the morphosyntax of Wakashan languages and general linguistic theory, if you didn't know any linguists.

Nuuchahnulth (formerly known as Nootka, which means "circling about" and isn't a native ethnonym) has verbs, nouns, subjects, and objects, together with markers of tense, person, topic, and a whole lot of other things. It is unusual in that any verb can be used as a noun and vice versa, in almost identical circumstances, so it is unclear whether they are separate classes. It is unclear whether it has a distinct syntactic role of subject, or whether the relations between elements in the sentence should rather be analysed as topic and focus or some such.

It also has incorporation, where objects of verbs are attached as prefixes to the verb; a lot of North American and Siberian languages have this. It also has a rich affixal system where meanings like "in a canoe" are expressed on other words rather than by a separate phrase. Again, it's not alone in this among the local languages. It may have a passive, or this may be analysable in terms of direct and inverse marking, as in some other North American languages.

As an example of the interchangeability of nouns and verbs, take these sentences, which differ in focus rather than outright meaning:

(1) mamukma quʔasʔi(2) quʔasma mamukʔi"the man is working"

mamuk "work", quʔas "man", -ma present tense, -ʔi definite. (1) expresses it as a subject/topic quʔasʔi "the man" preceded by the predicate "is working". Version (2) is more like "the one who is working is a man": topic mamukʔi "the working one" and predicate quʔasma "is a man". There doesn't seem to be anything transient, flowing, or even strikingly 'verby' about a predicate consisting of a noun with a verbal attachment. Turkish does it too: adamdır "is a man".

As an example of verbs with subjects, objects, and optional object incorporation, consider these:

maħt'ii "house", čakup "man" (no I don't know the difference; the only Nuuchahnulth dictionary is not previewed on Google Books), ʔaap "buy" interacting with -mit</i> past tense, -ʔiš 3rd person indicative. The initial element ʔu- in (3) is a dummy marker for the verb to be attached to when the object hasn't been incorporated onto it, as it is in (4).

Examples (1) and (2) from James Hurford, Grammar: A Student's Guide, Cambridge, 1994, p. 143, from material collected by Swadesh, I think.Examples (3) and (4) from Rachel Wojdak, The Linearization of Affixes: Evidence from Nuu-chah-nulth, Springer, 2008, p. 29.Yes, I do feel better after this, thank you.

A white dwarf that keeps exploding as a nova as its companion feeds material to it. M31N 2008-12a has exploded roughly every year since it was discovered, so astronomers suspect it is now at the wafer-thin mint stage.

The etymology given above from Wiktionary contains a misunderstanding. Linnaeus didn't name it after anything; he just used the ordinary Latin word papaver "poppy". It is debatable what this papaver came from. The Wiktionary etymology is apparently imagining a connexion (deep in time) with "pap".

In two kingdoms (of life): referring to a taxon that was traditionally classified partly by the animal people and partly by the plant people, because some of them photosynthesized and others didn't*, from the bad old days when people classified all microorganisms as either protozoa or algae. An example is the euglenids, now recognized as a monophyleticclade of excavates. For more see TOLWEB on Euglenida.

Formation of beaded, string-like structures by the expulsion of molecules from a cell during apoptosis. Also 'beaded apoptopodia', or in full 'apoptotic long-beaded apoptopodia'. Discovered recently at La Trobe.

One of the dictionaries cited here defines 'hypogene' as 'netherformed', a word with no entry at all, not even from that dictionary. I wonder if the other 24 people who looked it up before me were led to it by the same curiosity.

Thus was the abyssalbenthos discovered, the community of organisms living on or close to the ocean floor. In the 1960s a major advance was made by the introduction of the epibenthic sled, which rakes the top layer of the floor with fine mesh nets and traps the residue with a closing door to prevent the winnowing and loss of smaller organisms.

The Victoria cichlids fall in the special category of adaptive radiation called species flocks: they comprise relatively numerous species of immediate common ancestry and are limited to a single well-isolated area such as a lake, river basin, island, or mountain range. The chief theoretical puzzle created by species flocks is the process by which they grow. How can populations split repeatedly into species within a closed habitat that has no geographical barriers?—Edward O. Wilson, The Diversity of Life

Ballooning spiders are members of what ecologists, with the accidental felicity that sometimes pops out of Greek and Latin sources, have delightfully called the aeolian plankton. . . . The creatures composing the aeolian plankton are devoted almost entirely to long-distance dispersal.—Edward O. Wilson, The Diversity of Life

Okay, stupid (and rhetorical) question, it's been a while, how do I list a word I just looked up? I want a list button or a list of lists, and I can't see either. (I have a List button that takes me to a list of lists containing it, but as none contain it yet, this is an exercise in frustration and circularity.)

(Later. Boy, was that difficult. And the next question is, how come it's been listed once, commented on once, and favourited once, when I'm the only person who knows about it so far, and I didn't favourite it? Or are there other mysterious buttons lurking in the undergrowth? Grrr . . . goes to look . . .)

Early attempts at atomic bombs faced the problem that the uranium was so heavy it dropped out; this problem was called fallot. The remaining bomb would trigger, but exploded like a firework into a few fitful stars, leaving fa**ot.

Also related of course are finance (from the infixed present stem), flense ("taking your cut"), fleece (taking someone else's cut), please (what you say when you do: Grimm's Law applies), police (who they get when you do: epenthesis commonly trails in the wake of Grimm), pulse (which goes up when they chase you: compensatory loss of segment), purse (how could you miss this one?), and pence (in the purse – and here we are back at Grimm's Law, or Crim's Law as it's now known).

Don't write off to the OED with a 1909 antedating, though: it's 1923. The Google Books top date is wrong. If you scan for various years in it you find current events of 1922 and January 1923, and a scheduled event in September 1923 is a long way off.

This just screams folk etymology. A search on Google and Google Books for "my petuti" and "horse's petuti" show the spelling 'petuti' only goes back to about 2002. "Horse's patootie" can be found in Don Ryan's 1930 novel A Roman Holiday (a considerable antedating to the OED's 1959 in this sense).

It is not clear how we get from the slightly earlier "hot patootie" and "sweet patootie" to a buttockial* patootie, but petunias don't seem to be involved.

Of courfe they faid it. The examples in the right-hand column include a ftirring fermon by the late Reverend (and Pious) Samuel Davies, who afsures us:

But there are two words, which by a fynecdoche are often ufed in fcripture to fignify all his futferings of every kind, from firfl to laft; viz. liis blood and his crofs.

Now clearly 'liis' was an aberration; perhaps the Devil had pofsefsed him at that moment and he was unable to think clearly. I don't think we fhould take 'liis' ferioufly here. But his firfl futfering: what a fynecdoche!

It is aided in this deception by being a master of disguise. The crow appears as a small, nondescript bird who passes unnoticed as it cases other birds' nests, selects a suitable one, and goes into labour, spurning epidurals and the machine that goes ping! in favour of a low-key delivery of its eggs, which typically come in clutches of six to eight. The gentes or tribes of crow are classified by the pattern of their egg: paisley, batik, or piñata.

One crow in San Diego Zoo passed the last twelve years of its life as a peacock, and the deception was only discovered on autopsy.

Of unknown etymology. The second element might be related to the Irish for "fire", or it might not. The OED of 1887 finished up its etymology with this pungent and Rabelaisian criticism, words I fear will not make it through when it's revised for the third edition:

The rubbish about Baal, Bel, Belus, imported into the word from the Old Testament and classical antiquity, is outside the scope of scientific etymology.

The vagaries of attestation. The 2nd edition OED has a line from Love's Labour's Lost, dated 1588, as its first use: 'Once more Ile read the Ode that I haue writ'. Then follows a 1589 quotation from Puttenham.

The 3rd edition has corrected the L.L.L. date to 1598, thus making Puttenham an antedate. (And it notes the 1598 spelling was Odo, changed to Ode in the First Folio.) It now also has a 1579 quotation from Spenser, plus a 1538 dictionary entry—which shouldn't really count, as it's not a use.

Informally dubbed by researchers the 'Genesis Death Sandwich', this pattern offers the first clear example of this common rhetorical structure being used in the text describing the creation of the universe.

What on earth did you think they put in them? Prime cuts of delicious free-range, organic, rare breed, heritage beef, grass-fed, Eton-educated, humanely slaughtered, dry-aged and hand-ground by fairies with a pinch of pink Murray River salt and a twist of black pepper?

—Giles Coren in The Times, on the discovery of horsemeat, or indeed any meat, in Tesco Everyday Value Burgers

I should say, sometimes there’s a distinction made between languist and linguist. A languist is somebody who can speak a lot of languages. A linguist is somebody who is interested in the nature of language.—from an interview with Chomsky. And a word I'd never heard of till now.

True dat. A lesser-known but equally interesting fact is that ancient Macrobia was named for its diet. The royal family having been particularly impressed by the fare at a macrobiotic restaurant they had patronized, they granted it a royal warrant, ordered that all their subjects should eat macrobiotic, and changed the kingdom's name to Macrobia. The country lasted until it was swallowed up by a coalition of neighbouring kingdoms Vegetaria, Atkinsia, and Eggandbeansia.

According to Investopedia, unitranche debt is: A type of debt that combines senior and subordinated debt into one debt instrument; it is usually used to facilitate a leveraged buyout. Whatever that means. And it's all over the Interthingummy, so why hasn't it appeared here before?

According to Google, "Dart can be compiled to JavaScript, so you can use it for web apps in all modern desktop and mobile browsers. Our JavaScript compiler generates minimal code thanks to tree-shaking." —Google trumpets Dart release as first stable version in phys.org news

A computing term I've never encountered before: looking through the code and eliminating things that are never used.

The problem is that two 'definitions' found on the Internet are mutually inconsistent. That's got nothing to do with what a clade is. Clades are defined by descent; there's no actual need for any two members of a clade to share any particular inheritance. A clade is a species together with all its descendants.

'Niche market', however, doesn't show what part of speech it is. It is natural to suppose 'niche' is a noun in that phrase (as in 'stock market', 'bear market'). It is the ability to be modified by adverbs that shows it has (for some people) become a noun.

There's at least one French/English pair of surnames: Boileau = Drinkwater. Then there are the Rabelaisian names that get translated with the same structure: Baisecul = Kissebreech. Do-nothing is a translation of the old French fainéant kings.

José Carlos Meirelles is a "sertanista" – the name given to a select few people who scour the Amazon jungle is search of isolated peoples and then set up a remote outpost to monitor and protect them from contact with "civilisation".

Actually the pronouns mine and thine do, but kine doesn't. The -ine is the Germanic form of the adjective ending more familiar from Latin-derived equine, porcine, etc. Greek also had it*; crystalline is the only English inheritance of this that I can recall.

Kine on the other hand is a double plural: first by umlaut alone, ku: becoming ky:, then picking up the -n plural.

* Hm, apparently the -i- was short here, so perhaps not the same ending after all.

Trium (genitive as in trium virorum) does seem to be an error that has crept in. Older books pretty consistently favour trinum. (Tritium in Google Books is a scanning error for italic trinum.) One source gives ternarium, which would I suppose be synonymous, as in the adverbs trini/terni. Annoyingly, Perseus is now filtered at work so I can't do the proper checking.

It's not plurale tantum, as it readily occurs as both singular and plural in syntax; however, the two forms are the same, like sheep and aircraft.

This problem hadn't occurred to me before, but I agree in theory that singular species's is possible. However, we use apostrophe-only with certain singular words, such as classical names ending in multiple sibilants: Xerxes', Rameses', Jesus'. It's the difficulty of pronouncing the extra syllable that recommends the apostrophe-only, as it would in the narcissus' petals.

Previously almost invariably transitive; since 1960 however the construction 'befitting of' has greatly increased in popularity. Although Google Books still has it as only minute in numbers by 2000, today's Web shows it coming on very strong.

This is the first comment I have made here using information from the Ngram Viewer.

It is sad that Albert Ghiorso died (26 Dec. 2010) without seeing an element officially named after him, as Glenn Seaborg saw seaborgium. Ghiorsium was informally proposed for ununoctium after its claimed discovery by Berkeley, but the claim had to be withdrawn after fraud was discovered.

Today's aisle/isle distinction is recent, and aisle owes its silent S to isle. Although ultimately from Latin ala "wing", the church word was from about 1600 confused with or merged with isle, and often so spelt. Some time in the 1700s the hybrid spelling aisle came into use, and seems to have become established by about 1800.

In this same time period its use was extended from the side passages, the 'wings', to the central passage, the nave. Some complain that couples walking up the aisle are really walking up the nave, but the usage is long established now.

To give more detail, from -grad-s- in medial position; where the -s forms some perfects and supines. This assimilated to -grass- in the Old Latin period or earlier. In Old Latin stress was initial, and unstressed a before two consonants became e (so also non-initial morpheme -ject- from jac- "throw").

Not related to Latin id, despite the apparently obvious connexion via Grimm's Law. The Old English was hit, the h being lost in Middle English. This makes it related to he, both from a pre-Germanic *k- root (not as far as I know represented in Latin1). The neuter ending -t is however cognate with the -d of Latin id, quid, illud etc.

Term used in the CGEL for the clause that can be equated to a dummy subject 'it', e.g.

It is a mistake to eat eclairs in bed.

In most cases it might have been the subject instead:

To eat eclairs in bed is a mistake.

It has been extraposed from subject position to the end of the clause, after other complements. This distinguishes it from the displaced subject of a dummy 'there' clause, which is merely displaced past the verb:

The reason this works is that the second player beats the first to whatever sequence the first chooses. If the first chose HTH, that begins HT, so any second-player strategy XHT has a 1 in 2 chance of winning one round before HTH comes up. (Rather than the naive 1 in 8 chance of waiting for one or the other triple to turn up.)

You choose your X to make sure it's not symmetric: that the first player hasn't got the same advantage over your sequence. Their choice ends in TH, so you mustn't let yours begin with that. So choose HHT, not THT.

Gretna Green by piggyback, alternating. A roll or two of toilet paper for the bride's dress, and the groom could wallow in a pool of black mud and let it dry. Half a packet of Mr Kipling's Battenberg cakes on a knitting needle. Keep the crumbs to throw.

Also a surprising etymology, because of the vowel change. The Old Latin rule for unstressed vowels would give incelc- from calc-. Then the dark l rounds and backs and raises the vowel (as in the set velle, volo, vult).

This word seems the logical progression of a series denoting how many pieces a chess piece is attacking at once: quork, trork, bork, mork, and the harmless nork. More boards and new rules are required to achieve the higher-dimensional possibilities: hork, sork, ork, eeyork, and dork.

Rickety dwellings of undoubted fashion, but of a capacity to hold nothing comfortably except a dismal smell, looked like the last result of the great mansions' breeding in-and-in; and, where their little supplementary bows and balconies were supported on thin iron columns, seemed to be scrofulously resting upon crutches.

The small protective object under a mug or the like gets its name via an earlier meaning (unknown to me but perhaps not obsolete everywhere): a tray for decanters, so that they can 'coast' or go round the table.

The modern meanings of the noun and verb are not related in the obvious way. Latin costa meant "side" (including in particular "rib"), and originally in English as in French its descendant was applied to the sides of various things. In English the noun came to be practically restricted to the side of the sea, the sea-coast.

One French meaning "hill-side" was adopted locally in North America for a snowy or icy slope that could be slid down on a sled, and the act of doing so. Though the verb 'coast' had previously meant various things related to the ordinary noun, such as "abut, border" or "travel round the shore", the verb now surviving derives from the act of sliding unpowered down a hill.

I don't think so. Rather, we use the word fillet, as in fillet of beef, where AmE uses or might use filet. In the one expression where we do definitely write filet we pronounce it in French fashion, ˈfɪleɪ, namely filet mignonˈfɪleɪ ˈmɪnjɒ~. There is a stress difference: BrE ˈfɪleɪ, AmE fɪˈleɪ.

The idiom that wasn't. I was all poised to google for "number on choice", thinking perhaps it was a number as in "a nice little number", and on reflection, on making or having a choice . . . when I realized it was all just a typo and a missing hyphen.

In addition to the obvious use in auctioneering, this term is also used by the London Stock Exchange for 'the Exchange’s middle price (“the hammer price”) of the relevant securities immediately prior to the time at which the default was declared'.

As a verb coordination, this string behaves normally: The police stopped and searched ten people. As a nominal however, it is a compound rather than a coordination: They performed ten stop and searches. (*'Stops and searches' just doesn't sound right.)

Unlikely. 'Iterate' is only rarely used to mean "reiterate" (and many of the Google hits for "iterated that" are from Indian sites). In normal use 'iterate' and 'reiterate' have completely different meanings.

There's an uncorrected alphabetic copy at the ARTFL Project, so errors can be picked up by eye: spelling mistakes (most obviously, those out of alphabetic order), and tag errors for bold, italic, and indentation. The verb 'incase' is on Page 742, and subsequent pages show misspelt forms of 'incestuous' and 'incidental'. Slow going, but rich pickings.

Some Web copies of Webster 1913 are based on a scanning with numerous errors. Other copies are from a better (or perhaps corrected) scanning; and one of those shows that the definition here originally belonged (i.e. in the 1913 print) to two-word 'in case'.

Pronunciation oddity: the first syllable is long. You'd expect it to be short as in department, developmental. I thought this might be a recent development, but the OED only gives the pronunciation with i:.

Origin of the word grovel, by back-formation. It was originally an adverb formed of an obsolete word meaning "prone position" (spellings ranging over gruff, groffe, grufe etc.) plus an adverb formative -ling related to the suffix of headlong, sidelong, along.

HI Mr Hector, we also too like natvie United States-speakers visit our website making the innocent friends interested in many things such as like dog poo, Ponzi schemes, being hauled off to jail, So keep listening to at the door.

... but he was not a pawn on any chessboard of Mr Penicuik's making; and, for he was a gamester, he would have forgone every penny of that considerable fortune rather than have obeyed such a summons as he had received.

—Georgette Heyer, Cotillion, ch. 12

A highly unusual instance of a phrase beginning with causal for preceding its main clause. It is probably only possible here (to the questionable extent that it is possible) because it's a supplement inside an expanded clause, namely and he would have forgone... We could perhaps insert this supplement at other non-initial points in the clause too:

and he would, for he was a gamester, have forgone...

That is, although it appears to wholly precede the non-expanded clause he would have forgone..., its appearance is actually licensed by its being embedded in a higher clause. Or is it? Could we, could Georgette Heyer, with no more than the same oddness or archaism of phrasing, place it initially in an independent sentence?

For he was a gamester, he would have forgone...

No, I don't think so. The embedded version rates a '?' from me, the initial one '*'. It's not at all grammatical in my dialect; Heyer's original is merely surprising and odd.

The CGEL discusses various evidence about whether this causal for is a coordinator (like and, but, or, nor) or a preposition (like because, since), and comes down on the side of a preposition. (The traditional category 'conjunction' is not used by CGEL.)

I have just discovered a completely new construction. Faced with the clause 'The firm is intuitive to our needs', I thought first, 'That's not English', and second, 'How do we say that in English?' I then asked my respected colleague and she confirmed that it wasn't correct.

But Google shows about 150 000 hits for "is intuitive to * needs", which are robust (they don't go away as you page through). I was about to accept it as a mere quirk that I'd never encountered this construction before. Then I added site:UK to the search. That brings it down to eight (8) hits, rather than the expected ten to fifteen thousand. No wonder I'd never heard it before.

The [beadle's] rent is excused or lowered; he gets certain perquisites, such as a measure of seed-corn from time to time, or a piece of meadow (a beadle-mead) for himself, or a number of sheaves at the harvest.

A schedule added to an amending Act, setting out the final form that an amended section will read as after the amendments have passed: useful where the amendments themselves are small, patchwork variations to the previous wording.

Named after a Mr Keeling, who in 1938 asked a question in the House of Commons suggesting such a device. I got my explanation from Hansard of 13 Nov 2000.